I do apologize for the tardiness of this post. As much as I wanted to share this the following day, I had to wake up at 6 am for a business trip and when I arrived home on Wednesday, the house was in such a state of disarray that my wife would have been less than happy if not immediately attended to. With that, let’s talk about the outcome of our project…
Overall, Project: Spooky Doorstep was a smashing success! Our work paid off and everything functioned pretty closely to our expectations. Here are a few statistics from the evening:
- ≈ 50 kids came by
- 2 pairs of kids rang the doorbell, got scared, and ran away
- 1 of the above pairs was ushered back (reassured by their parents) only to have the dummy drop near the mom. She screamed and jumped back
- 4 kids cried (in our defense, they were being held by their moms, who were laughing and enjoying the show)
- ≈ 10 lbs of candy was given out (the good stuff too: Snickers, Twix, Payday, KitKats, Milky Way, … the kids earned it)
- EVERYBODY complimented us on the decorations!! (we especially like that part)
We felt pretty bad about the few kids who were crying so they of course got a couple extra handfuls of candy.
One little girl stood out amongst the other kids by exclaiming “O, wow! Did you do that with a motion sensor?” As an engineer, I hope that little girl’s curiosity keeps her asking questions like that, because that’s the sign of working mind!
For all of you wondering just how we accomplished what we did, stay tuned! We are currently putting together schematics and will be posting all of our source code.
Later days,
Chris